Freeware Version's Pattern Expert Very Limitedly Useful for Kyu Players

For the past week, on average every 45 minutes someone downloads the 300 MB install for the freeware version of Moyo Go Studio. That's pretty good, for such a huge download.

My sales went sharply up for a few days when I offered the freeware version, and then sharply down again, as many Go players obviously don't see the reason why they would pay money to increase their pattern example game databases by a factor of ten.

And printing - they will be able to use freeware, unless they like to publish-to-web or something fancy like that.

There is a mistake with the former reasoning though. It has to do with the nature of Go patterns. When you are a Kyu player, even if you are 1 Kyu, your games won't have many pro patterns. Hell, not even many dan players' games contain professional Joseki.

Therefore, if you are a Kyu-player or 1d, 2d, 3d or 4d, you really want to have those hundreds of thousands of 4d, 5d, 6d and 7d games to show you what others played in the same local situations. Let's face it, pro games simply don't have many of the patterns in your games. And even when you are a 4d, it's not bad, having over 100,000 games of higher strength then yours, giving possible alternatives that you can consider on their merit in your own game. And if you are a kyu-player, pattern-moves that are of 4d or higher are usually way above your own level, meaning that Moyo Go Studio's 400,000 extra games will enormously increase the usefullness of the pattern system. Not ten times - a hundred times! Because, as I said, Kyu games contain few pro patterns. By adding ten times more ama games, you get a hundred times more pattern examples. This is why I am giving away the version with the pro games. Because they are pretty useless for a Kyu player, as far as the pattern expert system is concerned.

Yet it's exactly Kyu players that benefit most of a kind of "Go GPS" that shows them possible alternatives and their occurances in actual games.

I use that metafor because I recently bought a GPS device for my car and no superlative suffices to describe its usefulness to me. A whole new world opened up to me, basically. Suddenly I can drive effortly back & forth to obscure places and I never have to wonder where I am or where to go. Having an instantly-fast pattern expert system available in your Go games must be a similar experience, I guess, for especially beginners. You wonder where to play next. But move suggestions are always visible, and moving the mouse over them instantly shows where those moves came from and where they are "headed".

And not in the context of ehterical deities as Pro players are, but in the context of strong amateur players who's games, playing styles and strategical plans have at least a semblance to those of your own.